Twitter is the buzzword on the blogosphere these days. Social media is considered almost synonymous with Twitter these days if you go by the number of posts tech blogs are doing on it these days.

Twitter’s rapidly growing right now and you can quickly make a lot of friends over there. Pringoo.com has launched a new product line which allows you to make custom T-shirts from your Twitter friend / follower list. Not only T-shirts, but mugs, laptops stickers etc too. Creating one is easy – enter your Twitter handle and decide whether you want to fetch 176 images of those you follow (‘friends’) or those who follow you (‘followers’). You can choose between fetching user pictures randomly or by most active. I would suggest you to go for the former because I found it gave better results. A hit-and-miss affair, yes, because you can’t choose which people to include on the T-shirt; although you can remove people from from the pictures fetched you can replace them with someone else nor does it fill it up with those of others. If you’re unsatisfied with the results then you’ve to enter your username and cross your fingers to hope you get a better selection this time. But otherwise, it’s quite good. Pringoo does have other varieties of Twitshirts in its inventory.

I received my order within two days, sent via courier. You won’t be able to discern faces when inspected closely, nevertheless it looks good from a distance. Seems to be printed using heat transfer so you’ll need to be careful not to wash it by scrubbing. Useful addition to your wardrobe for tweetups / blogger meets. (You’ll be a walking-talking advertisment for yourself. Wear some tattoos and you’re ready to roll.)

My rating of the Pringoo custom Twitter t-shirt: 7.1 / 10 (The score would have been higher if not for the agonizing moments I had getting a reasonable selection of friends when creating it.)

PS (to people who aren’t there in the photo lineup) – Sorry! I tried to generate the T-shirt many times so that I could get as many unique followers as possible. This is the best I could get even after multiple tries. Shouldn’t be an issue for those with follower / friend numbers less or around 176 though.

Update 1: Pringoo team got in touch with me and informed that you’ll no longer see duplicate images during the creation process. While this is true, the number of images you get are also reduced manifold. This is because of some issues with the Twitter API appararently where it’s not sending unique sets of friends / follower on multiple requests. Will keep you posted on any developments.

Nope, you aren’t in the photo line-up. Loads of people aren’t. But that’s how the script works. Pringoo sells the T-shirt in different sizes (you can see on the site) and it’s standard as far as I can see. I’ll post a link here to a full picture if I can put it up.